A Fan's Notes

by Frederick Exley

  Working under such conditions, I needed no time at all to decide that one ought to exercise such duties in style. I bought a couple tweed suits, a few delicately patterned bow ties, and a pair of sincere black Oxfords. Putting a lot of impressive-looking and forged documents into my in-box, I closed the door to my glass cage, and for the next few months read cover to cover every issue of Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Harper’s, the Atlantic, and The New Yorker, which still left time for Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, a volume I read till it came unbound and the pages started dropping out and cluttering up the in-box. In public relations there were only three of us who had been retained from the pre-Young days. On Young’s enthronement most of the men, including the boss, had been shown the door for having worked too stridently to prevent Young’s coronation— for doing their jobs, in other words; and shortly thereafter some of his own people began to seep into the vacated cubicles.

  Into the one next to mine moved a raven-haired Radcliffe girl with a superb behind, a pair of legs that must have held their own on the hockey fields of Cambridge, and an authoritative though pleasing voice. It was her job to answer Young’s lunatic mail. These letters were from people who believed, quite properly, that eight million dollars was much too much for any one man, and who, as a result, had come up with some rather novel and touching ways of rectifying the situation. Perhaps dear, drunken, and beloved old Uncle Casper was expiring from a minuscule tumor of the brain, and all they wanted was two thousand dollars’ “surtchon’s dues.” Others wanted a million or so for a Great Dane hospital, a home for retired pederasts, or backing for an “all-day musical,” featuring a thousand sequined chorus girls and songs by an unacclaimed lyricist named August Sugarword (the very same whose soon-to-be-immortalized signature could be seen bringing up the bottom of the letter). The girl was good; she knew her business. For two days I picked my nose and listened to her dictate before introducing myself, and by then I had a case on her.

  Dear Mrs. Curpartial:

  Thank you for your letter of October 20 requesting a million dollars to help construct your planned sanatorium for Great Danes.

  Let me say at the outset that, though I am unable to give to you the funds for this good cause, there is no one, I think, who is more fond of canines than I, and especially of your particular choice, the noble-hearted Dane.

  Without going too deeply into the reasons for my refusal, I hope you can appreciate that I am each year literally inundated with financial requests for one good cause and another. For that reason I have long made it my practice to give to the more general charities, Community Chest, etc., in the hope that what I am able to give will find a more equitable distribution among the needy.

  In conclusion, and if it doesn’t seem too presumptuous, I might offer a word of advice. Don’t you think you might have better luck by enlarging your plans to envision a sanatorium whose doors would be open to other breeds, the Chow, the Boxer, the Chihuahua, the Red-Bone Hound—perhaps even a mongrel or two? I wonder, really, if there will be enough Great Danes for the ample and lavish space you so obviously have in mind.

  Yours sincerely,

  Sybil Radcliffe

  For Robert R. Young

  That letter won me over; and Miss Radcliffe and I had a shy, kissless, and quite unsettling romance for a few weeks subsequent to my introducing myself. We sat in cozy Italian restaurants for three-hour lunches, nibbling delicately on breadsticks and smiling demurely at each other. I talked about Hemingway, she about Young, and that, in a nutshell, was the terrible division of our outlooks. She believed Young to be

  a Great Man caught up in matters out of the reach of other mortals, where, if I believed him to be anything (and scarcely looked on him as human), it was as a pipsqueak parvenu out of the Super State gone quite power-loony. Oh, she knew Hemingway—better than I did; but his world was as unreal to her as Young’s was palpable. Her alarming backside and luxurious thighs were always virginally enwrapped in black wool and gray tweed, and that was the way she wanted it. I always envisioned that grand thing sheathed in the Tyrolese corduroy of mountain hikers; and I had this vision of following it, so sheathed, up that pale precipice to the iridescent land where, once attained and in a tremble of exhaustion and anticipation, I would decorduroy, depant, and deflower her among the flora, the world’s colors coming into focus in the soft raven down of her thingamajig. I wanted to risk great happiness, but I never got the chance. Our “romance” ended one bleak night in Louis’ Tavern in the Village. I had taken her there to show her my “dream-tavern,” the place to which I fled every night to dream my dreams of fame. She said that she liked neither it nor the people there; I became upset, gave her money for a cab, and watched her walk away from me, wondering if I shouldn’t run after her. But I never did. I was hurt and furious that she hadn’t taken to Louis’. At that time Louis’ was one of the places that made my existence bearable.

  In the evening Louis’ was always the penultimate stop. There was Louis’, then there was bed, though there were always a number of stops before these. Immediately after work I always fled, jogging a little perspiration-inducing trot, to the midtown Young Men’s Christian Association I called home. The idea was to get to the communal showers before the fags did. For a time they hadn’t bothered me; I had read in a Paul Bowles story about a group of rather playful Arab Moslems who, after strenuously using a young Westerner, had relieved him of his penis, had sewed it into his mouth or belly or someplace (the story was an immense bore), and had left his naked and disfigured body to the African sun: there was some comfort in the knowledge that my sodomites were merely playful Christians. I thought the best way to act in the showers was quite manly, and for a few weeks I had stood among those steam-glistening, wispy young men vigorously lathering my genitalia and buttocks, and yodeling (I am a good yodeler) in a studiously indifferent way. I won’t say that I didn’t understand I might be making myself as attractive to them as a mustachioed and beribboned Scots Guard, that I was teasing, but I do know that it caught up with me, degenerating into a scene of ludicrously comical possibilities, with a frail, befreckled, and redheaded Christian youth, his man hood all afluster, madly pursuing my scarcely rinsed and virginal body down the long, bleak hall to my room where I just managed to get the chain latched in time. On my way out of the building that night I stopped by at the desk intent on registering a complaint. There I was met by a cross-eyed, sticklike ephebe who, bringing himself gingerly up to the counter in anticipation of my query, smiled demurely at me and said, “Yeth?” I laughed like a goddam madman. “Forgeth abouth it,” I said. After that day I started jogging “home” to get to those showers first.

  After showering I lay naked atop my iron cot for a couple hours, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, sometimes staring at the weird patterns made by the peeling lemon walls.

  Below me in the street, it was the rush hour, and the cabs seemed furious, screeching agonized brakes at each other’s behinds, and bellowing violently at each other with their horns. Doors opened and closed in the halls. Giggling, flighty voices drifted by my door. Occasionally I fell asleep to lovers’ quarrels that had erupted into clawing, head-banging, tear-laden affairs. On awaking, it would be dusk. The street noises below me now seemed far off—as remote as if they came from some distant city. The silence of evening was encroaching. Rising from the cot, I would dress, take the elevator to the lobby, walk through the door into the autumn night, and go in search of the future.

  My search followed a rigid pattern, beginning at P. J. Clarke’s saloon at the corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street. This bistro was said to have been employed by Billy Wilder in his filming of The Lost Weekend, being that saloon where Ray Milland in his splendid evocation of Don Burn-ham, the unwriting writer, had drunk his drinks and dreamed his dreams. Because of the notoriety brought on by the film, the place had, for the rich and the near-rich, for the gifted and the near-gifted, taken on a slightly sinister and degenerate aura, a place
where these good souls might go and imagine themselves hard by squalor. It was ironical. In the end they only rubbed shoulders with each other. Time after time I stood, as Milland had done in the movie, slightly aglow with drink and tried to imagine myself as Michelangelo sculpting the chin of Moses, or, looking out at the El (which still stood in those days) and seeing not Third Avenue but the Nile.

  But I had no luck. The atmosphere was without that bleakness conducive to dreams. The pink-cheeked, tweedy men, the downy-armed, thrilling girls, the antiquated mahogany bar, the murky yellow mirrors, the saw-dusted and white-tiled floors, all conspired to remind me of a genteel English pub. It might, one thought, have been sent over by some eccentric English man to keep the British Delegation to the UN from becoming homesick; and one could even imagine how, if that august body suddenly dissolved itself, workmen would arrive one day, carefully disassemble the place, pack it, smoky mirrors and all, into vast wooden crates, and send it back across the sea to London where it would be lovingly reassembled on a cobbled lane off Fleet Street. P. J. Clarke’s was not the sort of place to imagine oneself mingling with the profligate elements of the earth.

  Invariably I arrived there between eight and nine, squeezed my way among the blue blazers at the bar, ordered a fifteen-cent beer, and fixed on my face the smile of a man with implicit faith in the future. That smile was a positive receptacle for life’s possibilities. I did not want to miss, as I had with Cary Grant, a second chance to enter the future. When the gentle-voiced, intellectual man from the publishing house told me to get my “notes in shape” so that he could “look them over,” I wanted to be ready; when the Vassar blonde, rendered wobbly-kneed in the face of my benign charm, spurned her date and beckoned for me to follow, I wanted to be at her elegant, pump-sheathed insteps, panting. I never doubted that at any moment such a thing would happen, that a mysterious stranger would remark my “good looks” and “high intelligence” and in only a matter of hours I would be winging my way to Bonn or Lisbon or Johannesburg on a mission of grave and singular importance. I never talked with anyone save a young bartender, and no one ever talked with me. Yet for one so guileless I frequently found myself in some unnerving quandaries, having to restrain myself from bursting into anger. My trouble was my sanguine, ingenuous, and lunatic smile. Other men took it to be a piece of foppish coquetry, as if I were proposing to them English public school games; often I heard men in my vicinity make nasty observations about me, speaking with that hateful anxiety that signaled their fear of their own manhood. I had no idea what the Vassar girls thought of me. I expect it was nothing more than that I was a satyr on the make; one of them involved me in a remarkably unnecessary scene one evening.

  She was sitting at the street end of the bar with her back to Third Avenue, flapping her shoulder-length blond hair about in a somewhat affected though fetching way and permitting a flanneled, bespectacled undergraduate type to buy her scotch and light her Parliaments. She was extremely attractive, but like all the girls I saw at Clarke’s there was something a little aseptically unreal about her. At one time—for no more than a discreet moment or two—I had definitely been giving her the compliment of my stares, but I was now looking through her as through a glassless window frame, looking out at Third Avenue trying to see the Nile. Apparently her vanity wouldn’t admit the possibility. Quite suddenly I felt an irritated finger prodding me quite significantly in the elbow and looked up to find the undergraduate in what he assumed to be a posture of indignation. “Stop staring at my date,” he snapped.

  I did not like his tone. “I wasn’t staring at your date,” I said. I maintained my smile.

  Don’t give me that!” he said. “You’ve been staring at her for the last half-hour!”

  He was beginning to raise his voice, and I felt the blood go to the back of my neck, imagining all those sleek necks behind me cranking around in their button-down collars. Now the bartender was involved in it. He whispered to the man something to the effect that I was okay—just a bit “weird.” This apologetic tone infuriated me, and it was all Specs needed: he took it as license to become more indignant and began pounding his fleshless hand on the bar and screaming he wouldn’t have it! While he was doing this, I suddenly grew bored with him and, spurred on by the bartender’s patronizing me, really did start staring lasciviously at his date, ogling her and making tentative but definitely lewd suggestions with my tongue. Miss Vassar went into one of those swoons Victorian women were given to, letting her beautiful blue eyes roll up into her head and, her hands clawing the bar, hurled herself back into an imaginary divan.

  My mother has an aging cocker spaniel, Christie III, whose bladder can’t be stayed, and whenever the poor dog has to take a piss, he stands by the door whining something fierce and going into an incredibly pathetic jig. That’s what Specs seemed in need of—bladder relief. I watched him for a few seconds, smiling, then reached out, took his inflamed cheeks between my thumbs and forefingers, squeezed till they went white as alabaster, bent to him, planted an enthusiastic kiss on the down above the rim of his glasses, and walked out the door. A month later I ran into the bartender walking on Lexington Avenue. When he asked where I had been, I smiled weakly and said, “I wasn’t sure I was welcome.” He told me to forget about it, that for years he had wanted to do what I did to about 90 percent of the habitués of Clarke’s. The following evening I was back among the snug-shoulders, my smile a good deal more timorous.

  On leaving Clarke’s I always walked to Fifty-third Street, took the downtown train, got off at Fourth Street in the Village, and for the next couple hours drank beer at Minetta’s, the Kettle of Fish, and the San Remo on Macdougal Street. By eleven I was always, night in and night out, at Louis’ on Sheridan Square. Louis’ was one of those walk-down bars, its floor situated a half-dozen feet below street level. It was compact and cozy, its low artificially cobwebbed ceiling rendering its murky, yellow light mysterious, enchanting with smoke. Because of the smallness of the place, it seemed to be always swarming with people, and I took its atmosphere to be the very epitome of Village life, the vibrant, incessant hum of its conversations seeming to whisper of plays, paintings, and novels just short of being realized.

  I wonder now if I ever gave thought to how these things were to be accomplished drinking beer in Louis’. I don’t sup pose I did, though I knew better. At USC I had taken a course from Harlan Hatcher, who was on summer sabbatical from the University of Illinois just prior to assuming the presidency of the University of Michigan. He was a little wistful, a little surprised and perhaps dismayed by his rise in the academic hierarchy. He, too, had wanted “to write” when young; and if I took anything from his course, it was an observation he had made on Hemingway in Paris during the twenties. He said that while he and others tried to talk their novels out in sidewalk cafes, Hemingway was locked up in a room getting on with the business of his life, that though he did not know Hemingway, he knew of him, as all the young Americans in Paris did, and that Hemingway proved a constant provocation to them, like a furious clarion that books do not get written on the Montparnasse. I suppose I must have been aware that there were even then, out above me in the Village night, young men and women seeking to commit to paper or to canvas their all-consuming visions of America; occasionally I noticed at the bar a more provoking silhouette, a man whose isolated intensity suggested that he was even then phrasing in his mind darkly beautiful paragraphs. But I did not let these things provoke me, and went blissfully on my way, thinking of Boswell’s description of Johnson at work on one of his books. Remembering how the good doctor, having fallen heir to melancholia halfway through the manuscript and unable to write, had sent for the publisher and had dictated the remainder of the work while he lay abed (the beauty of Boswell’s humanity was that he never saw the humor of this), I saw myself lolling on a sateen divan, spitting grape seeds like Spencer Tracy’s Mr. Hyde, and dictating my immortal words to my Vassar blonde, taking five minutes out now and then for an orgy. In Louis’ in those d
ays, one could believe in anything.

  The patrons of Louis’ did not like each other very much. It is only now that I can see that we represented to one another wasted time and crippling dreams. Because of this we did not contain our tempers or our insults, and after a time I seldom talked with anyone save the bartenders, Mike and Red. Unable to communicate, we stood together at the bar caught up each in his own vision of the future, quite unwilling to respect each other’s dreams.

  The only man I liked in Louis’ I never got to know, the cinema star Steve McQueen. I only spoke to him once or twice. Even then he was quite unapproachable, as if he were already the man he would one day become; and the one time that I definitely remember having words with him, they were about a girl for whom we both had eyes, and the words were childish and petulant, involving as they did a good deal of sizing each other up. But I still have a very clear picture of him as he was then; in a way he seemed to represent all of us, at that time, in that place. Wearing the snug cap affected by sports-car enthusiasts, a cap that seemed to sit precariously atop his thick blond hair, a heavy green wool sweater, and corduroy trousers, he used to stand by the hour hunched over the bar, staring broodingly off into space. He had a casualness about him that suggested the indifferent aristocracy; but on closer inspection, there proved to be a very real hardness about him, the hardness of a gutter fighter, and one suspected that he hadn’t been corrupted by any pretentions he had picked up in a Yale “classics” course. There was an incredible hunger about him, as if he stood poised to devour the universe, and though I did not know what his particular dream was, I was sure that of all the habitués of Louis’ it was he who would make it. A few years later (and which madhouse was I in then?) I turned on the television and saw him in a cowboy suit pumping furiously away with some kind of sawed-off rifle, and a few years later opened Life and found that he was the hottest thing in Hollywood since John Wayne. Studying the photos, I wasn’t surprised to notice that he seemed not the least surprised at finding himself a King. In those days we all stood at the bar poised on the threshold of some rhapsodic destiny. Frank Gifford, more than any single person, sustained for me the illusion that fame was possible.